Your Customers
Statistical validity is not important for a B2B customer satisfaction (C-Sat) survey on the basis that customers are all different. In an InfoQuest C-Sat survey we will be telling you exactly who said what. And it’s important that you choose the most important customers to be included in your survey.
To this end we hope that you will find the following two diagrams helpful, whether your business has Activity Based Costing or not.
Most people will recognise the above diagram as being similar to their own circumstance. Parǽto’s 80:20 theory defines the curve – A’s being the major buyers of your goods or services and the C’s being the tail-end Charlies.
The second diagram highlights what often happens in terms of contribution.
The A customers know the power of their spending. They buy from you as though they are buying a commodity rather than a value-added item. The extra demands from large customers can include special packaging, special deliveries, stock-holding, extra-long credit terms, days out playing golf – all on top of extra-keen prices. These extra costs regularly turn A customers into marginal accounts.
But you need the A customers. They deliver the volumes that you need in order to gain the economies of scale – without which you couldn’t service the B customers.
My personal advice to clients is to carry out the C-Sat survey on the A’s and the B customers.
The survey needs to identify if any of the A customers are looking like they might take their business elsewhere, to the competition. If that happened, news of the migration might get out, leaked to the trade press, and some of your B customers might follow without knowing the full story. And that’s a bad thing.
And the B customers need to be surveyed so that more can be sold to them. This is where your profit comes from. This is where we’re looking for references, referrals, case-studies, cross-selling, up-selling and more business.
And when it comes to the C customers, those tail-end Charlies, they won’t be left out; they’ll benefit from the generic improvements you’ll be making to your systems, disciplines and procedures for the A’s and B’s.
About John Coldwell
